Courtesy of Lorretta P. –
I recently learned about some new buoys/cameras in the Bay and it occurred to me it might be a good idea to pass on info about the old and the new to SYC members — as boaters, we can never have enough information about the weather, right?
1) The granddaddy of the webcams is the one at Bellingham Cold Storage. To my knowledge, it was the first one focused on the bay and they put it up right about the time webcams came into existence. Access it at:
https://www.bellcold.com/about/
Click on “Bellingham Bay Cam & Weather.” It’s cool, too, because it has a link to weather history, so you can go on and see what the wind was doing for the past 48 hours or for an entire week, or how much it rained, or what the barometer is doing.
2) This webcam that shows current conditions west of Post Point on Bellingham Bay. Sponsored by Bellingham’s Community Boating Center, it’s really helpful for seeing exactly what the wind and water are doing on the bay so you can decide if it’s a good day to go boating.
http://www.boatingcenter.org/webcam
3) The link below is specific to a new buoy that was launched by the Northwest Indian College and UW early this year over near Portage Island, but it shows the larger buoy/weather station system around here and all kinds of information: air temp, barometric pressure, wind direction, wind speed, etc. So it’s another good link for finding out exactly what’s happening on the bay. It’s somewhere over near Portage Island.
http://nvs.nanoos.org/Explorer?action=oiw:fixed_platform:NWIC_Bellinghambay:observations:A1_AirTemp
Also, if you click on “Se’lhaem Bellingham Bay buoy” at upper right, you’ll get a great story about how/when/why the buoy was launched.
Have fun checking these out. You can spend hours looking at all of the information provided by the last link.